Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak on the current situation in Western Australia, where an absolutely dreadful wildfire is racing through the north and east of the city of Perth, heading down towards Ellenbrook. It's already destroyed at least 56 homes, and many others are damaged. Unfortunately, over the course of the evening, we could see that property toll increase. Thankfully, at this stage—and obviously this is still a situation very much in progress—there has been no loss of life caused by the bushfire. Everyone is accounted for according to the Department of Fire and Emergency Services in Western Australia, and that is obviously very good news. We must thank all those members of the firefighting service in Western Australia who are putting their lives on the line and protecting the property and lives of other Western Australians. Be they professional firefighters or volunteers, they are standing at the fire front and seeking to control an extraordinary blaze that is being fanned at the moment by extremely strong winds from the east.

As we think about the nature of fire in our environment, we need to cast our minds back to the generations before and the way they dealt with the bush. The bush in Western Australia has been actively managed. It was actively managed by Indigenous Australians and it was actively managed by our farming communities and the forestry workers of the timber industry when it existed in significant fashion. In my home town of Pemberton, where there used to be many thousands of workers employed in the forestry industry, there was a cadre of people who understood the bush, who understood fire, who understood the heavy equipment and machinery needed. But the point is that people could be put on the ground.

We had news come through this evening that a large water bomber has landed in Perth, coming from Sydney. That's great. They are an extremely useful tool, particularly in protecting property. But we must not get carried away by technology as the complete solution. This fire season we saw a significant fire on Fraser Island in Queensland. Something like 17 water bombers were used over the course of many hundreds of missions to try and control that fire, and the success was not terribly good. Water bombers, particularly in areas of heavy bush, cannot replace people on the ground. We as a society need to think about how we're going to manage those bush environments, to make sure that as our populations increase, and as we see more and more houses in peri-urban areas—in the last 10 years something like 300,000 new dwellings have entered peri-urban areas in Australia—we find ways of protecting those people, of managing the environment not only around our capital cities but also in regional areas. We must actively manage the land.

Locking up and walking away is never a solution. As I've said, this land has been actively managed basically forever, since there have been humans on this continent. When my father was a young man, you could gallop through the bush around our family farm in Pemberton—in fact, we had the large coastal leases from our freehold land down to the coast. When the first members of the colony went south to take up land for agricultural purposes, they found bush that you could ride a horse through. This is not country that can be locked up and left. It needs regular cool burns in order both to be safe for human habitation and to keep the environment relatively clean and open. There are now pieces of bush, pieces of Karri forest, extensively throughout the South West where you literally cannot even physically walk through the bush. That is not how it was. That is not how it has been for thousands of years.

Whilst we restrict and make it difficult for that land to be actively managed, whilst state governments fail in their responsibilities to actively manage the state forest under their jurisdiction, we are going to find a situation where these wildfires continue to grow in strength and continue to be a serious threat to both life and property. Water bombers are part of a modern arsenal of techniques that firefighters can use. But they are not going to replace those people on the ground with knowledge and skills—and not just when a fire is happening; there has got to be active management of the environment before those fires even occur. To do that, we must be much more active managers of that land right throughout the year. That needs to start as soon as possible.